I just heard that Evan Prodromou, a leader in the ActivityPub/Fediverse world, will be a keynote speaker at WordCamp Canada in October in Ottawa. I just wrote an email to him and Dan, which as often happens I realized while writing it that it should also be a blog post. So here goes!
Given that this is Canadian WordCamp, I was hoping that Evan might be there.
We've known each other since the early days of Twitter, when Evan was running identi.ca and I was trying to live with the limits of all the incompatible silos the tech industry was creating. Now we're starting to undo the crazy stuff, millions of people understand the importance of getting rid of lock-in, so finally we're empowered to fix a lot of problems. And at this conference, we have a chance to focus on one very important connection between WordPress and ActivityPub.
First, I love what the WordPress team has been doing in making posts flow from WordPress to ActivityPub. I have been blown away by what it can do, and how it moves the needle so far in support of writers.
- Because my new product WordLand connects to WordPress, posts that we write also can flow through to ActivityPub and can appear on Mastodon and any other AP-compatible system. It amazes me every time how well this connection works.
- It's also amazing because many of the features of WordPress writing make it through to Mastodon via ActivityPub: Posts can have simple styling, links, you can update posts, and a bunch more. I saw someone using a blockquote the other day and it looks great. I think almost all the features in WordLand make it across to Mastodon! Wow.
- But no one is talking about it. It's time imho to change that, and start making the Fediverse work for writers, and escape the limits of Twitter circa 2006. But before they can use it they have to know it exists.
- And since WP uses features in AP that most clients haven't tested with yet, because there was no way to use the features until WP supported them, there are obvious and simple tweaks that will make my WP posts look even more excellent in an AP client.
- And there's the connection between RSS and ActivityPub. I've been writing about inbound and outbound RSS feeds being a powerful way for systems to interop. A quick path through the walls between the systems. We have to do this, if we don't what would that say about the "open" part of the open social web?
So imho we have a lot to talk about. 😀
Dave
PS: Can this blog be viewed in Mastodon? That is, have you installed the code that enables this compatibility?
PPS: Dreams can come true, like what I wrote up in 2022 about textcasting. Think about it. WordPress brings almost all these features to the ActivityPub world, for the benefit of writers and their readers and the open web.
Comments
One response to “Agenda item: WordPress and ActivityPub”
It will be cool to get people trying out WordLand and looking under the hood, as I’m sure many developers familiar with Node.js will want to do. (https://github.com/scripting/wordlandDev)
To answer your question, no this blog is not federated with ActivityPub, BUT it is publishing new posts (title, excerpt, image, link) to one of our Mastodon accounts.
WordCamp.org sites have a fixed set of themes and plugins installed, but one of them is Jetpack, and it is connected to several social media accounts, including WPtoots.social, a Mastodon instance.
Those channels are shared with all users who can publish posts. So, every time you click publish in WordLand, you’re hitting all channels. 🙂
If you include a featured image and an excerpt (with some hashtags), that should come through pretty well on the socials.